Personal Identity

Abstract This chapter, armed with a fully developed phasalist metaphysics, turns to the thorny but fascinating subject of personal ontology and personal identity. The chapter argues that animalism, the view that human people are numerically identical to human animals or organisms, is the theory of personal ontology which fits best with the author’s phasalist metaphysics and his way of defending that metaphysics. The chapter also derives a broadly spatiotemporal criterion of personal identity from the more general criterion of identity that the author defends in Chapter 2. Having done these things, the author applies the resulting phasalist view of the human person to three major questions about the metaphysics of human people. When does a human person begin to exist? When does a human person cease to exist? And what happens to a human person in brain transplant cases? The author draws out the implications of his phasalist metaphysics for each of these questions and argues that those implications are plausible.